Wednesday 10th March 2010
HOME   FREE gift schemes   Poker Rakeback   Linux Poker   Betfair Bots		Betfair Betfair is the biggest sports betting exchange in the world, their servers handling 15 times as many transactions per day as the London Stock Exchange. Yes, they are THAT big! Why bet with an exchange? Traditionally, if you wanted to place a bet on a sporting event you had to go to a high street bookmaker or an on-course bookmaker at horse races. Not many bookmakers go bankrupt and the reason is simple: they are committing daylight robbery! When you are betting on a future outcome, you are simply betting on the probability of that event happening. Imagine flipping a standard coin. There are two possible outcomes: heads or tails, so the probability of flipping a head OR a tail is 50%. If you were betting on this event, you would require odds of 1/1 (evens) just to prevent you from losing money long term. At odds greater than 1/1, you can guarantee a profit over a long series of coin flips. Bookmakers, however will always give you odds LESS than the probability and therefore have a built-in "edge". Over the long term and thousands of bets, the bookmaker's overround will always net them a steady profit of around 10% to 20%. In contrast, a betting exchange allows bets to be placed person to person. It's a bit like having a wager with a mate. The main benefit is that you can play BOTH sides of the betting markets which also means that you can be the bookmaker. Having access to both sides of the betting market means that competition is fierce and therefore you get MUCH better odds. Overround books are common but they are often no more than a few percent over - which makes the bookmakers' 20% look awful! Having access to both sides of the market opens up a whole new range of betting opportunities. There are far too many to list here, but a little imagination and a few simple sums is all that is required to make a small profit. Betfair Bots When gambling meets computers, there are always ways to "cheat" or do your sums much faster than anyone else. Betfair is no exception. In the early days, a number of very shrewd software programmers made some extraordinary profits by automating some simple betting equations and mathematical calculations. Combined with a fast internet connection, the average punter who was still using a web browser had no chance. Betfair soon got wise to this and feared that customers may leave if they lost too much money, so they opened up the can of worms and introduced an API for other software programmers to use. The API is an official programming interface that allows anyone with programming skills to automate their betting strategy. And now you know why Betfair handles 15 times as many transactions as the London Stock Exchange... Using the API I'm a Linux fan. My home PC runs the Ubuntu Linux operating system. I also enjoy programming software and my language of choice is Python. It's simple yet very powerful. Bringing Betfair and Python together was a natural progression. If you understand the Python programming language and wish to automate a Betfair strategy, then you will find the following source code VERY useful. This is my Betfair API class and encapsulates all the most used API functions into a simple Python class. No dependencies are required, however you may need to install gSoap if you ever wish to upgrade to a newer API version or simply rebuild the XML requests. Also, HTTP requests are sent using Python's built-in urllib2 package, however high performance bots (i.e. refresh speeds of 10 times a second or more) should be upgraded to use the pyCurl library. Download the source code:   betfair_api_python.zip
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